What started as a book called Moral Ground, has become a fertile moral “ground,” a starting place for a new way to respond to climate change and other environmental emergencies. In the book, more than eighty of the world’s moral leaders challenge us to understand that the environmental crises are moral challenges, not merely scientific of technological problems. Meeting the challenges will require new ideas about what it means to lead a moral life. What are the deep values in which new ways of living can take root? What groundswell of moral affirmation will turn us away from lifeways that are barren and unjust, and move the world toward a future that is rich in possibility and promise? What does our personal integrity require us to do?

Here you will find the questions and the answers, the support and encouragement, and the lively exchange of innovation and ideas that will help you learn more, think in new ways, and take action.

What will move people to act to save their beloved world? Clearly, information and facts alone are not enough. Clearly, science is important but does not provide all of the answers. Clearly, despite their best intents, our politicians are not providing enough leadership. Clearly, it’s up to us. We need to make individual choices about how we live.

Climate destabilization and environmental degradation are scientific and technological issues, to be sure. But they are also fundamentally moral issues. It’s unjust that the wealthy few reap the benefits of their profligate use of natural resources and cast the burdens on those unable to speak in their own defense (future people, organisms and ecosystems, the marginalized poor, young people.) Industrial growth economies are creating a sixth great extinction, a human impact on Creation as cataclysmic as the impact of the asteroids that wiped out the dinosaurs. The dislocation and suffering caused by climate change have created an ongoing crisis. Technological fixes are not enough; they simply make it easier for us to continue wasteful and unjust behavior.

From this MORAL GROUND can grow a national conversation concerning our individual and collective responsibilities to the future. It is a moral call to action, a groundswell rising against the tide of human greed and disregard. From pulpits and prayers, from classrooms and city streets, from farmland and mountaintops, from city hall and congress, it is an affirmation of basic moral principles.

Yes, we can and must make conscience-driven choices about how we spend our money and time.

Yes, we must provide a safe and thriving future for our children.

Yes, tending to the Earth and reversing climate destruction are a moral, spiritual and religious imperative.

From this MORAL GROUND can grow a new approach to the environmental crisis, an approach with potential to create more effective social change. Our challenge is both to prevent further damage to the Earth and imagine new institutions, technologies, and systems that are just and sustainable across all continents. This is the work of individuals, of new and old communities of caring, and of civic and political institutions. Together, our work is to understand how deeply climate change threatens what we value the very most – the well-being of our children and of the earth that sustains them, body and soul – and to create new ways in which our lives can protect and nourish the conditions for human and planetary thriving.

MORAL GROUND began as a book and online publishing project. Over 80 visionaries – theologians, religious leaders, scientists, elected officials, business leaders, naturists, activists, and writers – address this challenge in their own voice, with their own unique perspectives. The book is the tool to understanding the moral dimensions of the planetary crisis, a resource to provide readers with the resources to frame effective arguments, to discover new ideas and approaches, and to help in your discussions with others. A series of town hall meetings and lectures has carried these ideas across the country, and additional events are being scheduled all the time.